RATING: 3.75✨
SPICE: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Trope/Setting Highlights:
#️⃣ ~220 pages
📖 MFM leading to MF Erotica
📖 FMC Ella (24yo, scientist)
📖 MMC 1 Nick (31yo, cancer research scientist)
📖 MMC 2 Hunter (owner/ringleader of The Spectacle of Secrets)
📖 Kinky circus
🌶️ BDSM
🌶️ Master/sub dynamics (MMCs Dominant)
🌶️ MFM and elements of “sharing”
🌶️ Pain play
🌶️ Punishments with pleasure + praise
🌶️ Use of toys/materials
🌶️ Bodily fluids
Review:
This is an arc review – thank you to NetGalley and the publisher as always, extremely grateful for these opportunities!
A Letter from the Author at the front of the book let me know that One Dirty Night is from Pepper Winters’ vault of unpublished stories and is actually one of her very first written. Flaws, filth, and all, Pepper wants this to be read, and I’m MORE than happy to oblige…
One Dirty Night by Pepper Winters follows our FMC Ella, who decides on her 24th birthday, after some self-reflection of her life until this point, to be daring and explore her wildest and kinkiest fantasies at the local circus. But it’s not just any kind of circus…
The Spectacle of Secrets invites you to One Dirty Night. One night where fantasies are indulged, and reality is ignored. One night where you can be free, be you, be used, abused, worshipped, and adored... Strictly R18. Couples encouraged. Singles implored. Entry must include a recent medical health certificate and proof of age. We look forward to you... coming.
Ringleader Hunter provides a traveling fantasyscape of kink and intimacy, amongst other things. And he has his sight set on Ella for tonight.
But he’s not the only one.
Nick, Ella’s roommate for 8 months that she’s been pining over but gets nothing but the cold shoulder back in return, shows up just as Ella and Hunter are adjourning for their special session. He begs, he pleads, let HIM be the one, let Nick take care of all her needs. As a last-ditch effort, in desperation, he says…
“Have us both … Fuck us both. I’ll share you… with him.”
Here is where we enter MFM territory The first sex scene of the book is Ella, Hunter, and Nick being intimate together at the circus itself. However, both men’s sole focus is Ella’s pleasure (and pain), and they don’t sexually interact with each other. This is the only MFM scene in the book, the rest of the story after Ella and Nick leave the circus focuses on the development of their (MF) relationship.
For me as a reader, I would classify this as an erotica through and through, honestly, not even an erotic romance. The rawness of the sex scenes, the in-depth spicy tropes, the intimacy of it all, even wrapped in the kinkiest of bows… all of those things outshined any semblance of a romance story. If I’m being honest, I didn’t really find Nick’s character romantic at all. Sexy and dominant as sin, with searing emotion and dark words, which is perfect for an erotica, but not a romance (for me). That’s why I so appreciated that Pepper created this, and treated this, as an erotica from beginning to end. And damn can she write engaging erotica! Writing sucked me in, never got stale, was a fantastic mix of smut writing and the ability to capture and portray the raw emotion in every scene. I knew what all the characters felt, deeply.
I need to talk about Hunter Dixon for a hot second. Because I know that Nick was supposed to be the “main” MMC and that he and Ella were always endgame, and yes I’m glad, I wanted to see Ella and Nick end up together. But what I want most of all, what I need as desperately as I need air, is for Hunter to get his own book and his own HEA. AND RHODES TOO. And maybe they do have them, I have to go book hunting👀
Also, side note, it was sometimes slightly jarring, nothing completely off putting, how the MMC Nick’s name would switch between Nick and Nicholas over the course of the book, sometimes within the same paragraph or couple lines. At first I thought this was intentionally done by the author to kind of differentiae the two sides of Nick, one side (Nick or Nicholas) was the restrained man in denial, while the other (Nick or Nicholas) was his Dominant set free, but the more I read and the more context I got, I don’t believe that is the case. I would probably just stick with one for standard.
Overall, if you’re looking for a quick erotica with an emotionally raw punch that’s light on actual romance, TRY THIS!